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Eran Kolirin and "The Band's Visit"

Eran Kolirin is an Israeli director who made a comedy to try to understand why he feels the kind of pain that persists after someone’s arm is cut off. He is still struggling to explain just why he made a film about an Egyptian military band stranded in an Israeli desert even after “The Band’s Visit” took both Best Director and Best Screenplay prize at last year’s Israeli Academy Awards and has won raves at festivals all over the world.

topics: arab cinema

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The 11th Arab Film Festival

The Arab Film Festival, now in its 11th year, is featuring not just 80 movies from 13 countries, but is also including screenings in Los Angeles, a first for a Bay Area-based fest. It’s also increasing its outreach to Bay Area schools and introducing the first annual Noor Awards (cash prizes for outstanding work in features, documentaries, and shorts) to precede the screening of festival centerpiece “Cut and Paste” (the new romantic comedy by acclaimed Egyptian director Hala Khalil) at the Castro Theatre.

Despite the multiple milestones, however, executive director Bashir Anastas insists AFF remains a modest outfit. “People think we are pretty big and we’re not. We just barely moved into a big office this year.” You can see what he means. AFF’s ample but sparsely furnished new digs on Brannan Street do betray a certain paucity and haste, as if a much smaller office were simply plopped down in a corner of the new one. And permanent staff still numbers only four. If the fest bounds ahead, it’s in large part to keep pace with a new and active 11-member board (which Anastas credits with pushing the expansion into Southern California), as well as steadily growing public and filmmaker interest.

“Since we transitioned from a founder-led organization,” notes Anastas, “our attendance has soared. We went from 3000 to 4200 to 6200; we’re looking at 8000 this year, and maybe more. That’s a result of both better organization but also more interest. You can tell not only by the festival but by reading the media, the number of people involved in Arabic Studies programs, and the interest in the Monterey Language Institute. We have received a ton of emails from Monterey and Santa Cruz and that area. That’s all new. We never had that before.” Coupled with this, Anastas confirms “a lot more submissions” from filmmakers.

While AFF continues to rely heavily on submissions, this year (in still another milestone nudging AFF in the direction of big-league players) the organization managed to send artistic director Sonia El Feki to two major international festivals, at Carthage and Cairo. As a result, roughly half the 2007 AFF lineup comes from discoveries made by El Feki amid Arab and international audiences, filmmakers and cineastes, as well as the grapevine buzz these settings foster.

“I’m always in search of films that show a rare aspect that you don’t usually encounter,” says El Feki. “We want to be surprised. It’s not always possible but we try.”

The scrutiny and networking such festival hopping affords seems to have lent quite a few surprises to the 2007 lineup, not to mention an added degree of cohesion and quality that dovetails nicely with AFF’s rising profile generally. A significant number of this year’s films, for example, reflect variously on cinema itself as a crucial form of reflection, communication, self-fashioning, and survival. Leading Moroccan filmmaker (and festival attendee) Moumen Smihi offers one such film in his humane and beautifully made “A Muslim Childhood,” reminiscent of “Cinema Paradiso” in its self-referential homage to the confluence of childhood and cinema in 1950s Tangiers, with a strong undertone suggesting cinema’s duty to voice hidden and suppressed histories, both personal and national.

Opening night’s “Making Of,” from veteran Tunisian filmmaker Nouri Bouzid, exemplifies this overarching theme in even more complex ways. An earthy drama about a rowdy, wayward but gifted break-dancer and social rebel, it stars the impressive and charismatic Lotfi Abdeli (scheduled to attend), who at crucial points breaks character and confronts the director to voice his growing unease with the storyline’s exploration of religion and terrorism (acting in such moments not only as “himself” but, indirectly, as an unofficial representative of the average Tunisian audience member).

In this somewhat arch but pointed manner, Bouzid wrestles with the problem of rebellion, self-expression, and dissent in an era of violent ideologies and authoritarian repression. Indeed, “Making Of” — whose controversial subject matter, together with its Brechtian subversion of its involving naturalistic narrative, caused a considerable stir at its Carthage Film Festival premiere, according to El Feki — is in part its own answer to that dilemma. Cinema, no longer a merely passive experience, presents itself as a forum for critical engagement and democratic dialogue.

In its own way, “VHS Kaloucha” points a similar moral. Nejib Belkadhi’s warmly entertaining and quietly distressing 2006 documentary profiles a 45-year-old Tunisian house painter from the tough but lively town of Kazmet, near the coastal tourist destination of Sousse, who blazes an intrepid path as an action movie filmmaker and star. Having roped friends and neighbors into low-budget productions since the late 1990s, and exhilaratingly bereft of talent, Moncef Kahloucha exudes a certain greatness all the same, well — earning his rep among his Kazmet neighbors, surrounding villages, and an immigrant community abroad longing for contact with the familiar faces and patterns of home.

The doc, with a fine rhythm and light touch, follows its hero as he completes his latest production, “Tarzan of the Arabs.” But Belkadhi’s narrative, unfolding episodically, takes in a whole social panorama with its portrait of Kahloucha. Thus, we start in Italy, where a group of Tunisian ex-pats are gathering to watch the latest VHS tape from Kahloucha, and cracking up to scenes of its filmmaker-star leaping around Kazmet in a leopard-skin loincloth. “It feels real,” says one man, referring to the connection the movie provides with people and life back home. As hard as that may be to believe given Kahloucha’s preposterous forays into the action genre, it is a theme that returns more than once. Kahloucha’s cameraman (who otherwise earns a living taping weddings in Sousse with his VHS Panasonic 3500) explains his boss’s unyielding passion in equally blurring terms: “With him everything’s real. He’d like to play all the parts.”

In an art form and business famous for cynicism, “VHS Kahloucha” effortlessly captures the fun and adventure of making it all up for yourself. Not that it’s always a picnic. Preparing to shoot at a nearby beach, director Kahloucha, unhampered by a working script, is explaining what’s going to happen to his three actresses when a clerk from the adjacent hotel comes over and angrily shoos them away. “I have a permit!” bluffs Kahloucha. (A quick-thinking ruse that, unfortunately, sinks just as quickly upon his inability to produce it.) Clearly finding the presence of men and women together suspicious, the hotel clerk shrieks, “This isn’t a brothel!” The older actress takes umbrage at this, but the clerk stomps off to call the cops as the frustrated film crew retires, undeterred, to another beach.

If the VHS visionary Kahloucha is a model of perseverance (occasionally spilling over into stubbornness and gentle megalomania), his admirably boyish passion and confidence is all the more impressive for being set off against an environment all too easily characterized by frustrated ambitions. There’s a serious backdrop of unemployment, limited opportunity, jail terms, patriarchal privilege, and emigration throughout “VHS Kahloucha,” as the comically innocent violence of Kahloucha’s action movies finds its real-life counterpoint in the frequent street fighting, alcoholism, and petty crime that are ubiquitous facts of life in Kazmet.

The cinema of resistance is perhaps most inextricable from the works, however varied, that come from such centers of conflict as Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. Among the dozen or so Lebanese films on offer, several have directly to do with the recent Israeli invasion and bombing. “Especially the digital works. We have quite a bit of shorts that were in response to, and were filmed during, the conflict in 2006 summer,” says Sonia El Feki, adding that decades of turmoil in that country have left what she sees as an ubiquitous climate of insecurity, even in films whose subject matter ostensibly lays elsewhere.

“The feature films show the latent uneasiness with having war looming every few years. I think that’s what the films are about. Even the vampire film [Ghassan Salhab’s excellent ‘The Last Man’]. It’s this danger. ‘Falafel’ [by Michel Kammoun] as well. [The main character is] out to have a good time, but just the turn of the street and he’s almost going to be in a fight with somebody because of it, just because everybody’s on edge. That’s what I’m understanding from these films. Everybody’s internalized the conflict.”

In this context, the act of filmmaking becomes more than a way of reflecting or interrogating reality; it’s an object itself ripe for contemplation and sublimation. “Some of the shorts are showing how people persevere, want to keep making films and keep living,” notes El Feki. “That’s part of their resistance.”

topics: arab cinema, film festivals

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TELLURIDE '07: Haynes' Dylan Stories Stir Telluride; "Band's Visit" Makes Politics Personal

While the Telluride Film Festival didn’t officially begin until after the annual outdoor feed on the town’s main street Friday evening, moviegoing kicked off even as some of the 3,000 or so festival attendees were still arriving in town. On Thursday night, festival-goers gathered at the outdoor Abel Gance cinema to see a screening of Norman Jewison’s “Thomas Crowne Affair” from 1968. The film features music by Telluride honoree Michel Legrand. Meanwhile across town, festival staffers attended an orientation and were given a special screening of Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There,” one of the buzz films of the festival so far. And yesterday afternoon, festival patrons and press got an early look at fest title “The Band’s Visit” from Israel.”

[SF360.org editor’s note: This article appeared originally in indieWIRE on Sept. 1, 2007. Additional coverage from Telluride is being published on indieWIRE.com, with more dispatches on indieWIRE editor Eugene Hernandez’s personal blog.]

Haynes and Dylan, Freedom and Identity

Introducing the first pubic screening of Todd Haynes’ “I’m Not There” on Friday night here at the Telluride Film Festival, rock critic and Bob Dylan expert Greil Marcus prepared the audience saying, “Even if everyone in this room loves it, you will be arguing about this film for a long time.” Indeed, not even 24 hours after the first showing ended, festival-goers have been buzzing about, and debating, Haynes’ innovative, exhilarating look at the life of an American icon. As has been well-documented, Haynes explores Dylan’s life through seven distinct characters performed by six different actors. And the film essentially offers a deep examination of music, cinema and popular culture rooted in the 1960s.

In “I’m Not There” — with access to anything that Dylan said, sang or wrote — Haynes has actually created multiple movies, each distinctly designed and shot, and then woven them into a two-hour and 15 minute film that is even greater than the sum of its parts. If you get up to go to the bathroom during this movie, Haynes quipped on Friday, you could miss 15 chapters of the story. Notably, other than an on screen statement at the start of the film that reads, “Inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan,” the musician’s name is never spoken in the film. The different personas of Dylan each have different names.

Cate Blanchett portrays a version of Bob Dylan at his most familiar, in the mid-‘60s during his infamous transition from folk to rock music, while Richard Gere plays Dylan as a ‘Billy The Kid’ type who lives in a Fellini-esque Western town, and Christian Bale is Dylan as a seemingly reborn Christian preacher man. It continues from there, with roles for Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, and Marcus Carl Franklin.

“Great actors want to do unconventional things,” explained Haynes, in a conversation with Greil Marcus on Saturday morning, saying that despite a notoriously dense script for this film, “All I was really focused on was trying to find a narrative and cinematic parallel, on some level, to what Dylan did to popular music in his era, not that it’s ended and not that it’s a singular turn.” Continuing he said, “I think I knew from the outset that I would fail ultimately because the ’60s were such an extraordinary time of audience openness to new ideas — expressing ideas and political ideas — and the hunger for newness and a suspicion of things that make money. That’s not true today.”

Today, Haynes emphasized, artists and performers cannot be as elastic as Dylan was with popular songs and achieve both artistic and popular success. “It would be a miracle,” Haynes said, “If the popularity that marked Dylan’s life would be something that we could experience today.”

“I am drawing from film tradition for each of the stories,” Haynes noted this morning a few hours before leaving Telluride for his movie’s Venice Film Festival debut. And those looking for links from his own filmography won’t have to go far, finding clear connections to both “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” and “Velvet Goldmine,” which each also explore popular culture.

Noting that the idea of freedom, a key concept in “I’m Not There,” is the ability to escape a fixed self, Haynes also reflected on similar themes in his own work. He said that his films explore the “dilemma of identity” that for becomes a “straightjacket.” Concluding the thought he said that characters in his movies, “demonstrate different kinds of rebellions against those constraints.”

Personal and Political: “The Band’s Visit”

First-time Israeli feature director Eran Kolirin briefly welcomed guests to a private patron and press screening of “The Band’s Visit” on Friday afternoon at the Telluride Film Festival, his Cannes award-winning film unveiled as a surprise showing for the fest’s special guests. Saying that introducing a movie is a bit like meeting a man or woman for the first time, Kolirin admitted that sometimes there is a connection, but other times there isn’t. This crowd-pleaser, which was acquired by Sony Pictures Classics in Cannes, clearly worked for many in attendance and had attendees buzzing favorably after the showing.

The film is the seemingly simple, often quiet story of an Egyptian police band that mistakenly ends up stranded overnight in a small Israeli town. Kolirin, a filmmaker with long lost dreams of being a musician, said he conceived of the film after imagining a uniformed man singing an Arabic song. He developed the story from there.

Made amidst the current cultural and political stalemate between Israel and Egpyt, the story takes on greater meaning in its depiction of band members bonding with local residents in the small town. Asked during a Q & A session about the recent wave of strong Israeli cinema, the film’s producer Eilon Rachkovsky noted that filmmakers back home seem mostly done “dealing with political issues all the time.” But, politely interrupting his colleague, director Eran Kolirian clarified, “I have to disagree, this is a political movie.” (Reprinted with permission, copyright Eugene Hernandez, indieWIRE 2007.)

topics: arab cinema, music, political film, telluride film festival

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Abbas Kiarostami: "Image Maker"

As a filmmaking icon as well as a filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami occupies two prominent positions: a central figure in Iran’s celebrated and multigenerational cinema movement, and one of a handful of supreme masters in that more rarefied, rootless milieu called “world cinema” (where he invariably falls in alongside Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray). This straddling, dual status is not all that arbitrary: while Kiarostami’s aesthetic is heavily indebted to indigenous influences (perhaps Persian modernist poetry and the groundbreaking work of his late contemporary Sohrab Shahid-Saless in particular), he’s also famously influenced (like other Iranian filmmakers) by Italian neorealism and France’s nouvelle vague.

topics: arab cinema, exhibitions, filmmakers

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